BIA/Kelsey’s SMB Digital Marketing conference takes place next week in Austin, TX, from Wednesday, September 11th through Friday, September 13th. One of the interesting elements to the conference program that BIA/Kelsey has introduced is the Future Stars program, which is designed to showcase start-ups. Start-up companies get discounts on registration and visibility at BIA/Kelsey events. And though its a little late for 2013, the Austin conference includes the presentation of a LOCAL Liftoff awards for the preeminent local digital media and SMB digital marketing start-ups that have been nominated in 2013. Below is a video from Michael Boland explaining the program.

Overall, the conference itself is filled with sessions on strategies for SMB marketing, customer loyalty, sales and lead generation, advertising and more. For a full conference agenda click here. Speakers are from companies including, Facebook, Twitter, Reply, Gannett, Google/Wildfire, Ben and Jerry’s, YP, YPG, Marchex, LevelUp, ReachLocal and more, as well as all the BIA/Kelsey analysts. Registration is still available.

MacKenzie Lovings, VP Marketing at BIA/Kelsey, shared a video from their spotlight series. In short, BIA/Kelsey is forecasting that national brands share of local media advertising will grow from $42.5 billion in 2012 to nearly $51 billion in 2017. Click here to view BIA/Kelsey’s detailed release of this data.

McKay Allen from LogMyCalls shared a video of Michael Fleischner, CEO, Upward SEO Consulting, who discusses how to minimize and fix bad online reviews. There are some good nuggets of information in this video. I have embedded it below so you can watch it. At some point, I may write a summary so stay tuned.